Cyber Valley, Europe's largest center for artificial intelligence and modern robotics, has gained a new corporate network partner in the Esslingen-based family-owned company Festo. In the year of its centenary, one of the leading manufacturers of automation technology is thus setting the course for the future of industry in the direction of deep reinforcement learning. According to its initiators, Cyber Valley offers a platform for scientists and companies to deepen their basic research in machine learning, intelligent systems, and robotics. The Cyber Valley community is a network of AI researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and startups, as well as partners from science, industry, and society.

Research and collaboration with startups

Festo will contribute to this partnership with its research facility, the Festo IoC lab. This laboratory is located at the University of Tübingen, a founding member of Cyber Valley. The partnership focuses not only on research and development in artificial intelligence, but also on developing networks for startups in the field of artificial intelligence.

“At the Festo IoC lab, we will expand our research and collaboration with startups in the field of generative AI and generative design,” explains Dr. Shahram Eivazi, head of the Festo IoC Lab and member of the Advanced Development Artificial Intelligence team at Festo.

AI in Festo's sights

Festo has been deepening its collaboration with the University of Tübingen since 2021 as part of an Industry-on-Campus project led by Dr. Shahram Eivazi. The initial focus was on deep reinforcement learning for robotics, which combines neural networks with reinforcement learning: The robot tries to achieve a given goal through trial and error. Based on the feedback it receives, the robot gradually optimizes its actions until it successfully completes the task. Meta learning, edge AI, auto machine learning approaches, distributed learning, and generative models are further AI fields that are being investigated in an application-oriented manner. The potential for AI-based applications to increase overall plant efficiency in production is enormous. The results are therefore continuously incorporated into existing and new AI applications from Festo.

Cyber Valley Community

By building a dynamic ecosystem and promoting close collaboration and rapid knowledge exchange between science, industry, and society, Cyber Valley is creating a future in which the full potential of intelligent systems can be harnessed for the benefit of society. One of its goals is to promote a culture of entrepreneurship in science so that findings from basic research can be quickly put into practice. This creates an ideal environment for start-ups and technology transfer. The Cyber Valley Corporate Network drives innovation in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics by promoting exchange between research, start-ups, and industry and enabling AI-supported insights to be used in a targeted manner.

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